Emotional Wounds and Healing; and What is 'Self' from a Buddhist Perspective?

And how does Identifying with 'Self' lead to suffering?

Good morning beloved reader,

With this post I’d like to invite you to consider, if within your psyche, you can identify an old emotional wound you may have endured — or in other words, when or how you may have been emotionally hurt in the past. And please consider a wound that is old enough to perhaps have scarred over; not fresh enough that it’s still an open wound.

Now I’d like to invite you to also consider:
in the healing of that old wound, there is an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth.
Which to me,
is part of the path of the Rising and Re-Claiming of the Divine Feminine.

I wrote about one of my own very old wounds, in Chapter 17 of my book, which you may read here.

While studying world religions in interfaith seminary, and in particular when we studied the ancient, Hindu sacred text, the Baghavad Gita, I had a visceral sense of understanding — perhaps I could describe it as a bodily knowing, or a knowing in my heart — of how it’s possible to observe my humanity from my divinity.

And by learning how observing one’s humanity from one’s divinity is possible, it helped me to heal old wounds.

My intention in writing about this process in Chapter 17 in my book, is two-fold: first I wanted to heal my own old wound, and then by shining the light on how that is possible, I hope it may light the way for you, my dear reader, to heal old wounds too.

~

And to add to the variety of processes of healing, recently I gained more insight into how Buddhists approach this topic, which of course points towards their 4 Noble Truths about how:
1. there is suffering in life,
2. what the cause of the suffering?
3. what is a way to end the suffering?
4. and what is a path that leads to easing suffering?

Our Buddhist sutta/sacred texts study/conversation group, plus one of our Buddhist monk friends, gathered again over Zoom last Sunday and I gained insight as to what Buddhists point towards when they talk about self. I’ve even heard them talking about “self-ing.”

From a Buddhist perspective, self is simply one perspective of experience. For example this human form of Camilla, sitting here on this chair pressing keys on this MacBook Air, has five sense perceptions: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and they all inform the perspective of this self.

And when we think about this self, our Buddhist monk friends talk about sakkāya-diṭṭhi, or personality view, meaning:

identifying with this body —
male/female, old/young, beautiful/ugly, healthy/unhealthy, race, size, gender, age, etc.
Out of ignorance we identify with that ‘me and mine’. 

For example, understanding the body as a condition that has arisen and that will cease, and that the body is not self, 
is a realization that leads to letting go of this personality view. 

We identify with our views of the world, with our thoughts, with our emotions, our feelings, sexual identity. 

We create identity through our emotions as well — this can be what language does: I am angry. Instead of, this is anger arising in consciousness — then it’s not a personal experience, it’s simply a condition arising and then passing.

This condition arising is not self, so I can stay in the position of the knowing and watch it cease.

The difference between
how the Buddha describes reality, 
and the way we usually experience reality,
hinges on the point of view of SELF.

source

And the idea is that, if we are not identified with self, this will ease our suffering. Like they say, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

“So you’re looking at the exact same thing,
you’re just learning to change the point from which you are viewing it.
…
You mean it’s possible to experience this and it’s not personal?

Even though an emotion may arise, if it’s not personal, it means I don’t have to suffer. It’s just something coming and going.

But not taking things personally does not mean not feeling.
We cannot help the way we feel.

But we no longer need to cling to the feeling. Simply to witness it arising in consciousness and letting it pass.”

The truth of my own experience is that enormous spaciousness may be experienced when we no longer identify with self, which of course helps to ease suffering.

~

To me, it seems that the insights Buddhists gain when describing and understanding this definition of self, are similar to the insights I gained with understanding how the Bhagavad Gita points towards observing one’s humanity from one’s divinity. Through studying the world’s religions, my experience showed me that all faith traditions point towards invaluable spiritual principles and perennial wisdom; and each path just approaches the human experience from different angles. I invite you to consider how your own religious conditioning may affect your own experience of our human condition.

Perhaps because I listen to a lot of Eckhart Tolle’s talks, and he talks about spiritual principles from all of the world’s faith traditions, I find it ironic and gently amusing when any of our Buddhist monk friends become identified with Buddhism as the one and only ‘true’ path.

Perhaps it’s just their self that is identified with their religion😁